Apple hiring ‘dozens’ of former Texas Instruments engineers in Israel

“Apple has been expanding its workforce in Israel over the past couple of weeks, tapping a pool of former Texas Instruments (TI) employees in the country to build up research and development centers in Hertezliya and Haifa,” Matt Brian reports for The Next Web.

“According to sources close to the situation, Apple has been hiring ‘dozens’ of engineers from Texas Instruments after the company began cutting around 250 jobs from its Ra’anana development center as it looks to lay off around 1,700 employees (about 5 percent of its total workforce) globally,” Brian reports. “Many of the engineers working at the development center were focused on the development of TI’s OMAP and radio (including WiFi and Bluetooth) chips, which are used a number of new smartphone and tablet devices.”

Brian reports, “In September, TI announced it would wind down its operations in OMAP chips and instead focus on embedded platforms, impacting its Israeli workforce. TI is said to be looking to shift its entire R&D center back to the US and shutdown activities in Israel completely.”

Clearly you know little about the economic scene in Israel. Intel both develops and manufactures chips in Israel, including the Core family of CPUs, and is one of Israel’s largest exporters. Warren Buffet’s first overseas investment was Iscar, a manufacturer of precision cutting tools. In 2006, even as rockets were falling in Israel’s north, Iscar continued to operate.

Apple made the move to Israel after buying Anobit for its Flash RAM technology. (Apropos, disk-on-key was invented by M-Systems in Israel.) Apple’s new development center will be in Haifa, a few miles from Technion and its highly regarded Computer Science department. Apple will be getting some first-rate engineers from this TI crowd.

And despite the best efforts of the BDS crowd, CEOs continue making investments in Israel. IBM, HP, Siemens, Cisco, Sandisk all have investments there. Ballmer visited recently. (Konnect was invented by Israeli start-up PrimeSense.) And US-based Noble is drilling for gas off Israel’s shores.